Hey Veeky Forums

All the shit and repetitive threads everyday and you have to have a problem with 1 rare thread of a writer speaking about their interesting experiences writing? u avin a laff mate?

How could you not be jealous of a young writer who is being published and paid to live in a remote cabin in norway to write, and has a girlfriend? Now I know youre super envious, doubly, because you couldnt even admit that obvious honest harmless truth

I am not.

Hello. It is written in Norwegian yes. Whether there will be translations I don't know. The publishing house has formal links with various foreign publishing houses so it's a possibility. The novel is about a young male NEET who decides to pursue various means of supporting himself due to his inability to get a job. He attempts to grow crops in his living room of his apartment in order to be self-sufficient and detach himself completely from a society he so despises. He dresses in the clothes of his deceased mother and tries earning money as an erotic webcam model. He hosts a PUA-style dating workshop for local men (despite being a virgin) and takes his grandmother from her retirement home to serve as his female assistant. Failing at all these things, he hides in the closet and listens to his more successful older brother and his girlfriend having sex and writes online erotica about what he sees and overhears. Surprisingly this earns him a reputation and some money, until his brother's girlfriend discovers the stories and informs her partner, only for them both to find the protagonist sitting in his closet with a laptop prepared to pen another story. The protagonist's older brother believes his brother to be suffering from a lack of female companionship and sets him up with a girl who is in fact a local escort he pays to take his brother's virginity. He is forced however to keep paying the girl when the protagonist falls in love with her and insists to keep seeing her, believing her to be the embodiment of a pure and virtuous femininity. Finally he discovers their arrangement and feels betrayed by the one person he believed he could trust. He visits his mother's grave and tearfully apologizes for being such a failure, then sneaks into his grandmother's retirement home and falls asleep on the floor of her lonesome room. The next morning he catches an early train to Oslo, where so many desperate young NEETs go to find work and where he reluctantly goes for the same reason. On the train he sees his brother get out of the escort's car and run to the platform and demand that he get off the train. But the train is already in motion and he departs his hometown for a city where he knows not a single person.

So it's a Norwegian rehashing of A Confederacy of Dunces

I have read that book but the comparisons only go so far really. My protagonist is not physically grotesque (he is actually rather cute, and attempts to use this knowledge to his advantage while modelling online) nor is he writing a manifesto of any sorts. I am also not writing an out-and-out picaresque novel or one which is populated by extreme, comedy-driven "characters". My editor compares it to Narcissus and Goldmund.

It'd be neat if you actually did write a book but I'm convinced that the only thing you ever actually write are these threads.

Thanks for the comment.

>white male: the thread

I should add that the book is also written in first person, and so in that respect it resembles Notes from the Underground more than it does A Confederacy of Dunces. My intention is to write a novel as entertaining and representative of a certain social / cultural period in much the same way "Welcome to the N.H.K." succeeds in doing in Japanese.

Sounds good until the ending. You need something better following the discovery that the girlfriend is an escort. The train ride to Oslo is a big poster saying "Author couldn't think of an ending!"

Do you think there is any message in the story? It seems kinda like some speculation on post-modern society, or maybe just something for a lonely group to relate to, but what do you think?

Yeah he should get his brother back somehow. It would be more thrilling at least.

This us a really good thread, thanks op !

As a fellow Scandinavian i am excited to read your book

The jelly is real lmao

>grandmother's retirement home

Have you considered some interesting thing about the retirement home? Like he tries to use that to find work, with the old people, and hearing their stories and jobs? Maybe even there is some kind of racket in there (gambling, drugs, porn, junk food.. he sneaks junk food to them... maybe there can be a seen, when hes on the floor, he hears old people having sex? or tries to hit on women there?)

I dont get the, brother get out of the escorts car? Why was the brother in there? And the brother didnt want the neet to go to oslo, because he could get lost or? wanted to try to make amends?

also, it sounds like, you were really good at writing erotica, so you tried to think of a way to incorporate that into a literarily respectable story, which I guess, is very intelligent of you, as there will be a bit of something for everyone.

I haven't written the ending yet but I feel this ending allows me to write a novel that is not simply a farce involving inhuman characters. It essentially proves that while humorous, the protagonist's struggle to find work and prove himself both to his older brother and his deceased mother is also quite a serious thing for him. Although we readers are informed that the protagonist believes he will succeed in the city, believing himself better suited and more able to thrive in a more civilized urban setting, we also understand how unlikely that is.

I don't want to condense the story into messages, morals, and so forth. Nor is the story theoretical in any broad political, economical (etc.) sense. I am simply attempting to write a rather funny story about a desperate, delusional, pretty narcissistic young guy who suddenly finds his grandiose self-perception challenged by the fact that he can't even earn a minimum wage. In a struggle to assert his value he invents various schemes by which he can earn both money and fame, though his naivety and general inability to function in life means that these schemes result only in further failure and humiliation. Ideally the reader would both identify with and feel compassionate towards the protagonist despite his flaws, realizing that he lacks whatever his older and more "normal" and mainstream brother possesses. Their relationship also is pretty important to the story, both in terms of two brothers and their contrasting personalities, and also as to what they represent, with one being a successful insider and the other a cantankerous and rather pathetic outsider. As for speculation regarding post-modern society, I would have to know your understanding of that term in order to reply properly I'm afraid. Much of the story is about the atomization or severe individualism of contemporary life in a Western society and the ambition to become famous in order to satisfy a human desire previously satisfied by intimate inter-personal relationships and so forth.

>Yeah he should get his brother back somehow. It would be more thrilling at least.
Pretend to be his brother, while his girlfriend is sleeping in the bed, in the dark, and have the rauchiest most debaucherist sex (pissing, shitting on her, whipping, spitting, slapping, puking) and write his best story ever, about him having sex with her, that gets world wide acclaim (that might be too cheesy and obvious though),

then the brother ends up marrying the escort, and the neet ends up turning the brothers girlfriend into one of his brotheled whores.

I feel it is impossible that they simply become close once more, idealogically speaking. For similar reasons I feel it is crucial that Holden Caulfield is expelled from school rather than him graduating from it. School in Catcher of the Rye represents (as do many things) youth, and his being expelled from that state is symbolic of the novel as a whole, wherein Holden struggles to adapt to the world beyond his childhood. In order for reconciliation to take place between the brothers, one of whom represents the practical demands of society and the other the demands of the self, must require a form of resignation or change of perspective from one of them. The rather sad conclusion of the novel is a consequence of the fact that in travelling to Oslo the protagonist will either end up destitute and alone as always or will have to become like his older brother, something he is both incapable and unwilling to do.

No, OP is an attention whore. A thread like this is fine but posting a picture of himself and talking about his life is Facebook-tier, especially when the book has every indication of being mediocre and artistically uninspired.

Could you at least have the protagonist be redeamable? Like he has something that his brother has that no one appreciates or understands?

As for the ending, I get that you want it to be vague but you should at least have an extra scene at the end to tie up loose ends. (Like the brother gets home and finds a note from the protagonist)

Any chance we could the name? It seems like a pretty fun read.

The retirement home is one of the reasons he feels so contemptuous towards society, its residents on the whole having essentially been cast aside by a society which can no longer profit from their labour. He himself is the only one who visits his grandmother, although this is in part due to her confused semi-willingness to help him launch his career as a Pick-Up Artist. I considered involving fellow residents more in the story but couldn't do so without turning it into more of a slapstick novel. The escort is the friend and roommate of his brother's girlfriend, and after the protagonist goes missing his brother visits the escort only to discover that he has discovered their arrangement. He realizes where his brother is going by talking to her and demands that she drive him quickly to the rail station. His brother doesn't want the protagonist to go to Oslo because he realizes how fragile he is and how unsuited he is for adult life in a society where the competition for jobs and everything else can be so brutal, and knows also that he is only going there to prove that he is self-sufficient (something he failed to prove with his crop-planting strategy). As for erotica, small excerpts do appear in the story for the sake of exposition, but they only show how inexperienced the protagonist is sexually, forced as he is to rely on technical jargon for sexual organs etc and for his obsession with sex fuelled in part by his not experiencing any.

>predominantly heterosexual.
hahahhaaa faggot

That's the thing, I am intending to write about what society would judge to be a "failure" in a way that reveals certain virtues or a certain sensitivity he possesses which shows that the standards of social "success" will always be foreign, undesirable and even unreachable by somebody like himself. While his brother is earning a steady wage, dating a girl he intends to marry, and resembles in large part the boys' father (who the protagonist was too young to know), the protagonist meanwhile struggles to emulate his brother and the reader comes to understand that he is simply ill-suited for competing in the same race as him. His desperation to please and to earn validation from others is rather sad, in my opinion, even though its consequences are quite humorous.

Thank you! The title in English is "The Dignity of Toil", which is a phrase used ironically (although I do worry that people will think it suggests the book is sober and old-fashioned) in Bertrand Russell's essay 'In Praise of Idleness'. In the relevant passage he writes about how the upper class throughout history have praised the dignity of toil, and of backbreaking work, while they themselves have avoided such work as best they can.

Have Norwegian publishers been scrambling to find the next Karl Nausguasuguard?

this

Maybe, I'm not sure. I met a retired editor who lives near my grandparents' cabin and he offered to read my work (in progress) and encouraged me to keep writing one thing. Then without me knowing he sent off the first three chapters, which I'd spent time revising for him, off to a friend in the publishing world and they contacted me directly to ask for more of the same work.

>I feel it is impossible that they simply become close once more

I now think I may be wrong, but i thought they meant, get him back, like get revenge, for the lying about the escort.. even though older bro was trying to help

The older brother initially only paid the escort so that the protagonist could lose his virginity, and only reluctantly but out of love for his brother does he keep paying her to continue keeping him company. The protagonist feels betrayed but his brother has been patient with him over time and offered guidance where he could, so it's not as if they part despising one another, the protagonist simply concludes that he must make it on his own and that only in Oslo will he discover a means of proving to his brother and everybody else that he is capable of succeeding in this world.

can you post an excerpt or something in english?

>is "The Dignity of Toil",

How about, "The Toil of Dignity"

0.00001% royalties... youre welcome

I can post the first sentence or so if anybody is interested? I haven't signed a contract yet so I have to be careful about copyright however (kidding).

Thanks, now I have something to look forward to in 2018. Hopefully I forget most of what you said here by then haha.
Yeah I meant some sort of payback. the underdog getting revenge is always a fun movement.

Nah, "The Dignity of Toil" is better.

alright, well how about at least at some point, the brother turns to face the camera and says "bro...that is just the price we must pay: it is, the toil of dignity"

>This thread still not deleted.
Just fuck you mods

bait

Hvor bor du mann

Near Haugesund

oh yeah i mean a thread talking about literature and writing fucking delete this shit. we need more "name one woman writer that..." and "name one black that.." threads in the cat!